This US election marks a fork in world history

With a week to go the polls are showing that the contest to become president of the United States is deadlocked. Donald Trump’s vitriol filled hate rally at Madison Square Gardens appears to justify Kamala Harris’s strategy of leading on how dangerous, divisive and racist he will be. But Trump himself declared it was a “Lovefest” and this is being reported as if it was indeed one. It is now normal for him to suck his millions of supporters through the looking class into his travesty. At the same time Jeff Bezos of Amazon and owner of the Washington Post, leads the US oligarchy in declaring neutrality. In such circumstances it seems sensible to hold off speculating on the future of America and the world until after the November election.

But this is also a special moment of high anxiety. We face what may be a definitive turning point in modern history. Personally, I feel my entire political life is on the block. It’s a strange sensation; one that combines a feeling of vindication that I’ve been right all along even as I sense the axe blade of modern fascism above my neck about to sever any hope for a progressive future.

For the roots of the contest between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump – go back to the 1960s. While radicalism in Britain took the form of satire, deep political passions were defined by America. There, a long civil conflict began. It still divides the US, it shapes much of today’s politics around the world and it defined my generation.

In 1968, Donald J Trump was 22, the perfect age to be blown away by its heady transgressions. Kamala Harris was only four. Today, the images conjured up by ‘The Sixties’ are of left-wing revolution: the civil rights movement, rage and riots against the Vietnam war, Black Power, sexual liberation. Indeed, the 1968 ‘revolution’ was triggered by the Tet offensive in February, when the Vietnamese stormed the US-backed regime in the South of their country. Militarily the so-called Viet Cong were crushed but politically they won by revealing that the US was fighting a people not a conspiracy.

It took seven years. Despite half a million US troops, the napalming of the countryside, the eventual B-52 bombing of Hanoi and the deaths of up to two million Vietnamese, America lost.

The consequences roiled America.

In 1968 itself, the assassination of Martin Luther King decapitated the civil rights movement, that of Robert Kennedy obliterated the most credible Democrat politician to oppose escalation in Vietnam. The old order never ceased to mobilise and it was Richard Nixon who won the presidential election in 1968. He and his side-kick Kissinger expanded the war.

It was racism at home and racism abroad that defined the times, not the Left. As Bruce Springsteen put it in Back in the USA: “Got in a little hometown jam/So they put a rifle in my hand/Sent me off to a foreign land/To go and kill the yellow man.” Trump personifies and reproduces this dark side of the Sixties: its demagogic, anti-elitist, rule-breaking, ‘fuck-you’ contempt for conventions, apocalyptic violence and promiscuous misogyny.

In a compelling account of Harris’s personal career, Fintan O’Toole shows how, far from her being a continuation of her radical parents as Trump claims, “She is a child of the revolution only in the sense that she grew up in its wreckage”. However, she is also the product of the two progressive responses that materialised out of and against the Sixties ‘revolution’: the second wave of feminism and the politics of human rights.

Inspired in part by the rhetoric of the Left, feminism challenged its vanguardist dogmas and asserted the rights of full and equal agency to all humankind. And after 1975, in the wake of defeat in Vietnam, the US embraced ‘human rights’ and signed the Helsinki Accords with the Soviet Union to formally end the Second World War. It was entirely cynical in its motivation. It was cynical but nonetheless its claim of universal values led to the International Court. As feminist lawyer, Harris personifies the two progressive responses to the wreckage.

“Trump personifies the dark side of the Sixties – Nixon, racism, promiscuous misogyny. Harris is the product of the progressive movements in the same period – second-wave feminism, human rights”

What happened in the four decades after the seventies is well-known but bears summarising as it remains an active influence on today’s confrontation. Capitalism sought to recover from what the Trilateral Commission described as “too much democracy” and settled on what it termed globalisation and is now known as neoliberalism.

The financial crash brought this period to an end in 2008, just as Obama took over the White House. In part inspired by the vibrations he encouraged, the Occupy movement was a political uprising of ‘the 99 per cent’ that finally brought the issue of inequality into US politics and then, thanks to the leadership of Bernie Saunders intothe Democratic Party .

But the Democratic machine shut down his challenge so that Hilary Clinton would take the reins and reproduce the corrupt neoliberal relationship to Wall Street that marked her husband’s presidency.

On the right, the Tea Party movement had already mobilised against ‘globalisation’ but Jeb Bush was favoured as the establishment candidate for the Republicans. As the brother of the former president his role was to shut down their head-bangers. Had all gone according to expectations, therefore, Obama’s presidency would have been an intermission that sprinkled his inclusive stardust on a regime of entitlement.

Instead, it was the ‘unelectable’ Trump who smashed this expectation beating Bush in the primaries and Clinton for the presidency. Even as he appealed to the worst instincts of white Americans, Trump traded on the rightful feelings of injustice that had become intolerable to them and made voting count! Ironically, the proto-fascist saved American democracy. It is because he achieved a sense of empowerment among those who were indeed marginalised that helps explain the cult-like loyalty he retains.

In a moving speech in Pittsburgh on 11 October in support of Harris/Walz, Barack Obama spoke about the way Trump and his supporters were spreading disinformation about storm relief for mere party advantage as people were trying to get the aid they needed.

“The idea of intentionally trying to deceive people in their most desperate and vulnerable moment! My question is, ‘When did that become OK?’” It was not a rhetorical question. Obama is a skilled public speaker and he posed it in genuine bafflement.

But part of the answer goes back to his own presidency. As the financial system imploded he oversaw the banks being saved with huge bailouts and not a single banker being jailed. At the same time he permitted over 10 million homes to be foreclosed, casting many millions more into extreme precarity, without offering them a bailout. When did that become OK?

The taproot of Trump’s support goes deep into the experience of America being betrayed. militarily, economically and politically, from the folly of Iraq to the robbery of finance. Reinforced by the malicious media, Trump made himself the spokesman of historic discontent.

It does not follow that he will win again as he did in 2016. Then, speaking in Pittsburgh, he was able to tell voters, “globalisation has made the financial elite who donate to politicians very, very wealthy. I used to be one of them…. But it left millions of workers with nothing but poverty and heartache”. With plutocratic cunning, he presented himself as a turncoat who had come to deliver the people from the wickedness of his class. Or as he told the Republican Convention,“nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it. I have seen first-hand how the system is rigged against our citizens.”

“Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it. I have seen first-hand how the system is rigged against our citizens”Trump

Eight years later, as he seeks to regain the White House, it’s harder to project himself as the outsider, although this was helped by the defiant image of the failed assassination. Today it’s personal. Aggrieved by the way he himself has been treated, his cry is more ‘revenge’ than ‘salvation’. Nonetheless his campaign projects itself purposely: righting the supposed wrongs America has suffered. Aggression, defiance, talking about the totality – all this was also crucial to the appeal of the Sixties.

Harris stands for the opposite: inclusion, reasonableness, continuity plus the all-important demand for freedom to choose the fate of our bodies. Culturally – and this is the most important – she holds out for an America in which it is possible to breathe and be different.

But she is not asking, “what's wrong with America that we have to fix?”. Nor recognising the American roots of Trumpism. Instead, she continues the Obama-Clinton-Biden-Pelosi line that Trump is fundamentally “un-American”. This may prove to be the fatal weakness of her campaign.

In their interview on Fox, Bret Baier challenged her to say what she wanted to “turn the page from” given that 79 per cent of US voters said the country is on the “wrong track” after three and a half years of her and Biden’s administration. She adroitly finessed the question and turned her reply into her central message: it is to turn the page on Trump and his exhausting domination of the mental and media space.

Politico’s Jonathan Martin makes the point from the Right. “Merely condemning the former president and celebrating what unites Americans isn’t enough. Yet Harris just can’t seem to go beyond that, to sketch out what her version of Washington in 2025 would look like. That reluctance is confounding Democrats, who hear the echoes of Hillary Clinton’s campaign in Harris’ focus on Trump’s character.”

“Merely condemning the former president and celebrating what unites Americans isn’t enough. Yet Harris just can’t seem to go beyond that”

Nonetheless there is a progressive kernel to her candidacy for she also embodies a resistance to the inhuman nature of the world order of the last half century whose damage is most clearly carved in the climate emergency. While she is not rallying voters in the direction of effective solutions , Trump is doubling-down on destroying any possibility of them.

Internationally, a second Trump presidency will be an unspeakable disaster. The far-right will be turbocharged around the world. It will green light corruption, clientelism, the privatisation of public space (see Elon Musk), surveillance and authoritarian homogeneity. Although he has probably never read it, Trump’s programme is now the one set out by Xi Jinping when he took over the leadership in Beijing in 2013 in Document Number Nine.

Opposition to universal values and human rights; rejection of constitutional democracy with its separation of powers and judicial independence; repudiation of an autonomous civil society; denial of free speech and an independent media; and refusal of neoliberalism, giving the state the final say over the market.

The consequence will be a gangster international that will unravel the limited means we have of holding power to account. It will use the arbitrary violence deployed against minorities, immigrants and smaller nations, from the Uyghurs to Palestinians and Ukraine, not to speak of the eleven million undocumented Americans now threatened with deportation, to intimidate everyone.

How is it possible that we are only a few days and a few votes away from such a possible catastrophe? The answer is, ironically, the real threat posed by Kamala Harris. Her strategy is to appeal to middle and conservative America. Nonetheless her mere existence opens the way to a more egalitarian future..

Beneath the megaliths of hi-tech capital and consumerism, a humanity is emerging that seeks fitness, fairness and tolerance and embraces the love that does justice. If Harris wins, sheer demography and generational change threatens the far-right with irreversible defeat. This is what they fear. This is why they back Trump. And this is why the US election of 2024 has become the fight of our lives, for all of us, within and without the USA.